P.C. Shannon

Listen people, the avian flu is coming. Hopefully later rather than sooner, but there will be a pandemic. And it’s gonna be bad. I’m not going to scare you with apocalyptic predictions, but please, get a flu shot.

As far as anyone can remember, I personally have only ever had the flu once. Never had it as a kid, never got it in college, even when my roommate in the dorm did. I finally caught it in New York City at the end of 2003. Caroline got it too, which was surprising because she’d had her flu shot that year. The injection only protects you against the three most common strains from the previous year, and that year, a strain of influenza called Fujian was very common. Still, the shot provides some generalized protection against all types of flu, so Caroline had a slightly better time of it than I did.

As a microbiology student in college, I realized that one possible reason that I never got in flu in spite of obvious exposure was that I had a mutation that made me immune. In a large enough population, there are always individuals with a natural immunity to a given disease; there are some people in the world who are immune to HIV, for example.

I also knew the particulars of influenza mutation and evolution. I won’t go into the specifics, but suffice it to say that influenza mutates and evolves rapidly, so that different strains appear every year and every few decades theres a pandemic. This means that if I had a natural immunity (and not just good luck), it wouldn’t protect me forever. The fear in the back of my mind is that when the next pandemic came, my mutation would make me hypersensitive to the virus, sealing my fate.

Now, my theory of natural immunity turns out to be true. A recent article in the journal PLoS Biology (technical article and general audience synopsis; I love PLoS, but that’s a subject for a different time) examined the genes of a number of flu viruses collected in New York State, including the so-called Fujian strain. Fujian just so happens to have certain mutations that make it different from the more common types of influenza, hence the epidemic of the 2003-2004 flu season.

These mutations also, apparently, allow it to overcome my natural immunity. The mutations obviously contribute to the strains increased pathogenicity. The bug that causes the coming pandemic is likely to have similar mutations as well as being ferociously virulent. Clearly, it has my name on it.

Really, its an emotional reaction to think that my mutation, which has so far granted me immunity, would work to my detriment when the avian flu strikes. Logically, I would be no more or less susceptible than anyone else. On the other hand, my body has only ever had to fight off one influenza virus, and that lack of general flu antibodies might work against me.

Hmm… When do flu shots start?

More goodness, from me to you.

Consumers’ Rights, including tips on how to get a refund for stuff that don’t work.

Homemade Prison Wine from The Sneeze, home of “Steve, Don’t Eat It!” Hilarious.

The Daily Set—the old set of The Daily Show is going on tour, without Jon Stewart or any of those other fake news people.

Hacking Firefox—This time, it’s tabs and navigation.

Getting Orgnaized with Digital Photography

Worry-free DVD Burning—Reviews of the latest Sony DVD burners

DVD Flambé—Which brands of recordable DVDs give you the best value for the buck? More importantly, which survive being microwaved?

DVD Burners at PCWorld

On Tuesday, I complained about Apple’s Quicktime technology. But my problems with Apple don’t end there.

This semester, I’m taking a class with a bunch of evolutionary biologists (more about this in a future post), who are all way into Macs. I suspect they love Macs for the reason that any group or professional class, like graphic artists, loves Macs—purely an accident of history. But at any rate, I’ve been using Macs a bit lately, and they drive me up the wall.

Bear in mind, I owned a PowerMac all through college, so this isn’t just a complaint of someone who’s resistant to change. The user interface is very pretty, I’ll grant that, but it’s annoyingly inefficient. The biggest problem is this: the mouse only has one freaking button! But the MacOS has the equivalent of a right-click menu. So how do you get to it? You have to hold down a button on the keyboard whilst clicking on an icon. So dumb.

The MacOS X windowing system doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. There’s no way to make a window full-screen. The icon bar at the bottom is transparent, but you can’t put anything behind it, although sometimes a program will open part of its window back there. That means you can’t click on it. But the only way to resize a window is to click on its lower right-hand corner, so if that corner is behind the menu bar, I hope you like your window size.

Plus, closing all of a program’s windows does not exit the program. That’s retarded. And if you want to change between windows in one program but can’t see them all, you have to use the “Window” menu. There’s no list of windows in the task bar as Windows has.

Now, if you want to rename a file, you can’t just do the equivalent of a right-click and pick “Rename” from the pop-up menu. That would just make too much sense. Instead, you have to choose the “Get Info” option and rename the file in there. There are some parts of Windows XP that are like this—getting to an option takes 5 steps versus 2 in the previous versions—but these are very technical items that most users never need to get at. Renaming a file is a basic, routine operation, and it shouldn’t take backflips to get to it.

Apple’s computers have always been slower and more expensive than the equivalent “wintel” machine. Now they’re also harder to use. But gee, the interface sure is pretty. Whatever. Apple has the market share it deserves—there will always be suckers and accidents of history.